The Elko Independent Archive

In May 1869, E.D. Kelly, publisher of the militantly anti-Chinese Humboldt Register and Workingman's Advocate moved its plant from the declining town of Unionville, Nevada, to the new railroad town of Elko. In his first editorial in the newly established Elko Independent, Kelly described the founding of the town:

About the beginning of January, 1869, the first tents were pitched on the present townsite of Elko. For the casual observer there was nothing to be seen in and about the sagebrush flat on which the town was built to warrant the belief that at a near day in the future a city of many thousand inhabitants would rise to control the commerce of the Great Basin.

By 1870, Elko was an important freighting center for the surrounding mining districts and the third most populous county in Nevada. However, Kelly was impatient with what he considered the slow pace of Elko's boom and sold his interests in the Independent to a new partnership headed by his silent partner, Judge George G. Berry. After Berry's partners left to purchase the Carson City Appeal, Berry hired William B. Taylor, owner of the opposition Republican Elko Chronicle to run the Independent, which had been reduced in 1872 from its original semiweekly publication schedule to a weekly. Taylor later became an owner, but he in turn left to start the Republican Pioche Review in 1872. New owners took over the Independent and added a daily edition(Daily Independent) in 1875. The paper was sold again in 1886 and then again, in 1892, to W.W. Booher, who ran it as the Weekly Independent until he retired in 1914.

After Booher's death, the new owners of the Independent suspended the weekly edition in December 1914. In the midst of declining gold supplies and a slumping economy, the Independent published in August 1916 a promotional 76-page Industrial Issue filled with local advertisements and feature stories on Elko mining, agricultural, and commercial businesses. "In preparing the text of this edition on the resources of Elko County," the editors stated, "we have endeavored to be conservative and not over-estimate. It has been our aim to give plain, ungarnished facts, for the truth regarding this vast empire is good enough. This section has been referred to as the Frontier of the World -- the Last Great Land Chance . . . Elko County's future is as certain as the dawn of tomorrow. All that is needed is the magic touch of capital and labor to develop the resources now dormant." Despite this optimism, both the paper and town of Elko continued to struggle, and the Independent was reduced to a triweekly schedule.

In 1920, Harold P. Hale bought the Elko Independent, as it was then called, and ran it successfully until 1937 when Warren L. Monroe of the Winnemucca Humboldt Star acquired the newspaper. Monroe remained its sole proprietor and editor until May 1975. The Elko Independent continues to publish today.